Ballmer pushed back against the idea that passion is something explosive and emotional that you either have or don't. He shared his own winding path to finding it: he wrote his first computer program in ninth grade and hated it. He started college wanting to be a physicist or mathematician, gave that up, then discovered through managing his college football team that he liked organizing things. After college, he worked marketing brownie mixes at Procter & Gamble but couldn't stand the pace. He was considering a career in the movie business when his buddy Bill Gates called and invited him to join a 30-person company called Microsoft. 'Find your passion,' he urged, 'so that every day you can get up, even on the bad days, and say I really do love what I'm doing.'